Legacy of Secrets (52 page)

She said, “I’m going shopping, John.”

“Whatever you like, Lily.”

“In
New York,”
she added.

“New York?”
he repeated with astonishment.

“There’s a new designer, a woman from London, the latest thing … besides, the change would do me good. I’m bored….”

He was immediately sympathetic, guilty about his own preoccupations. “Of course we shall go to New York. We’ll stay a few days, do whatever you want. Next week perhaps, or the week after.”

“I’m going now, John. Today. And I shall go alone. You would not enjoy trailing around shops and dressmakers. Besides, the change will do me good. I shall be quite safe, I shall stay at the best hotel.” Lily added before he could say no, “And I shall bring you back a present.”

Two hours later, she was on the train to New York, alone. She took a suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and asked them to send up a maid to unpack her things. Then she took a long, scented bath and dressed as carefully as if she were going to meet a lover, in silk stockings and high heels and a black lace dress with a low, wide neckline and
long, tight sleeves. The maid hooked the dozens of tiny satin-covered buttons and gazed admiringly at her in the mirror as she swept up her black curls and pinned them with a scatter of diamond stars. She added long diamond earrings but decided against a necklace. She flung on a black velvet wrap edged thickly with black fox, checked her appearance in the mirror, then took a cab over to Broadway.

The theater foyer was thronged with noisy, laughing, expensively dressed people and she smiled, feeling in her element again. And people turned their heads to look admiringly at the beautiful woman all alone in the crowd. Of course there were no tickets. “Not for a Ned Sheridan opening night,” they told her.

Undaunted, she made her way around to the stage door. The doorman eyed her up and down, then he took off his cap and stood up. “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asked respectfully.

“I am here to see Mr. Sheridan.”

He shook his head doubtfully. “Mr. Sheridan doesn’t see anyone, ma’am, not on opening nights. Not till after the show.”

“He will see me,” she said confidently. “Tell him Lily Molyneux is here.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Still shaking his head doubtfully, he pushed open the heavy black door and disappeared inside, leaving her shivering with cold and excitement on the sidewalk.

Harrison Robbins answered the knock on Ned’s dressing room door. When the man told him in an urgent whisper that Lily Molyneux was waiting to see Mr. Sheridan, he stepped hastily outside and closed the door quickly behind him.

“Lily Molyneux?”
he repeated incredulously, even though he had always thought she’d turn up one day. And, true to his perception of her as “trouble,” she had shown up at the worst possible moment, on a first night, twenty minutes before Ned was due onstage.

“Tell her Mr. Sheridan can see no one before the show.” But then he realized Lily was not the sort to take “no” from a doorman for an answer. “I’ll tell her myself,” he said, striding purposefully along the drab corridor.

Lily swung around, a smile lighting up her face. “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “You are not Ned.”

She walked toward him and Harrison knew immediately why Ned had fallen for her. Though the theater world was full of beauties, Lily was easily the loveliest woman he had ever seen. There was an alluring feminine grace in the tilt of her head and the question in her wide eyes and the half smile on her lips. Even her voice was soft and musical.

“I was hoping to see Ned,” she said, clutching the fur at her throat.

She was sure to be all the trouble Harrison had thought she would be and more, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t keep her away from Ned, and he knew when Ned saw her, the poor sap would be a goner. Lost in love for Miss Lily Molyneux. Again.

He said, “Ned can’t speak to anyone before the show. You understand, don’t you? He has a very difficult role. He needs to concentrate and you would only distract him.”

“I’m an old friend,” she said quickly. “But of course I won’t disturb him. I would have liked to see the play but there are no tickets.”

“At least I can take care of that for you.” He escorted her back to the foyer and told the usher to put her in Box C, as his personal guest. He told Lily he would come for her after the show and hurried back to Ned’s dressing room.

F
INN
O’K
EEFFE HAD BEEN KEPT LATE
at the office and it made him late for the theater. There were problems in the financial world, rumblings of bank failures and a recession and, unlike many others in his profession who claimed it was all scaremongering and that there was nothing to worry about, he was concerned. He had stayed late especially to speak to Cornelius James about a disquieting bit of information
he had received from a fellow at one of the big banks, about the rumored insolvency of a major company, but Cornelius didn’t seem too concerned.

“It happens every few years, Finn,” he had said calmly. “Everyone gets panicked, the market goes wild for a few weeks, shares fall, and everyone predicts the end of the world. Then everything’s suddenly ‘all right’ again, and all the smart fellows who’ve bought on a falling market sell again at the inflated price and make a killing. It’s a good ruse, while it lasts.”

But Finn still had an uncomfortable hunch that all was not well. When he picked up Jessica Tyrone, his date for the evening, at her family’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, it was still on his mind, and he apologized for his lateness.

“I understand, boy,” her father said. He was an Irishman from County Kilkenny who had made it rich fifteen years before, striking oil after spending half a lifetime scrabbling across deserts and rocks. Now he had built himself a grand mansion on Fifth Avenue, with fifteen marble bathrooms. He had three daughters of marriageable age and he looked very favorably on young Finn O’Keeffe.

Jessica was blond and pretty enough, though not a great beauty. But she was a “catch,” and her father liked the fact that Finn was Irish and handsome and doing very well for himself in an area few of his countrymen had yet penetrated: the closed, narrow world of Wall Street and banking. And he also liked the fact that he was an Irishman who had made it with his brains instead of the sweat of his brow.

The auditorium was in darkness and the first act had already begun when Finn escorted Jessica into their box to join a group of her friends. All eyes except his were fixed on the star, Ned Sheridan, whose mesmerizing voice filled the big theater.

Finn simply could not concentrate on the play; he thought restlessly of what Cornelius had said and how he should believe him, but something in his gut was telling him no. He knew it would be going against Cornelius’s
rules and the advice he had just given him, but he was determined to gamble on his own hunch. That was the way he always operated and he had not been wrong yet. Tomorrow he would dump the shares of certain companies everyone but he himself believed were sound. If he was wrong, he would lose clients as well as cost his company a fortune: and Cornelius had just gone out of his way to tell him that he was wrong. But if he was right, he would save their fortunes.

The play seemed interminable and when the final curtain descended, Finn applauded with relief. The audience rose as one to give Ned Sheridan a standing ovation. Jessica whispered to him about how wonderful Ned was and he nodded politely, though he had not heard a single word of dialogue.

He thought the audience would never stop clapping and let him go home. His eyes wandered restlessly over the auditorium, stopping interestedly to look at the woman alone in the box opposite. She was half in shadow, but there was something eerily familiar about her profile and the proud way she held her head and the curve of her long neck. He shrugged; she was just another beautiful woman; New York was full of them. But he liked beautiful women and he watched her. He caught a glimpse of her face as she flung a fur-trimmed wrap over her shoulders and turned away.

It was a face he knew intimately in his dreams, in all his lost hopes and in his memories. He told himself that it couldn’t be, that it was just a trick of the light. He was looking at his dream. His love. His nightmare. He was looking at Lily.

“Is everything all right?” Jessica asked concernedly.

Finn stared blankly at her, as though he had forgotten she even existed. Then he remembered they were supposed to be going to Sherry’s for supper. He told her quickly to go with her friends, that he had to get back to the office to take care of something urgent.

He pushed his way through the throng on the red-carpeted
stairs down to the foyer, glancing urgently around. He grabbed an usher and, pressing ten dollars into his hand, asked him to find out quickly who the lady alone in Box C was, and if anyone knew where she had gone, but the man came back with the news that she had been given the box at the last minute and no one knew her.

Finn clenched his fist and slammed it into his palm. He could swear it was Lily, he
knew
it. She was in his heart, his head, and his guts, and he knew it was her just the way he knew about those stocks. He walked out into the cold night street, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the wind, watching the departing crowd, hoping he might see her, but soon everyone was gone and he was alone on the windswept sidewalk.

He walked to Delmonico’s and bought himself a glass of whiskey at the bar. His face was pale and tense and the barman, who knew him well, said concernedly, “Are you feeling all right, Mr. O’Keeffe? You look like a man who’s just seen a ghost.”

Finn’s troubled gray eyes met his. “You are right, Mack,” he said bitterly. “You are so right. Only it wasn’t a ghost. It was a demon.”

H
ARRISON
R
OBBINS OPENED THE DRESSING ROOM DOOR,
but Lily put her finger warningly to her lips and stood there for a moment, watching Ned. He was slumped tiredly in front of his mirror. Lucky was standing next to him, smiling with relief that the dreaded first night was over and it was another big success.

Ned lifted his head and looked in the mirror. He looked beyond his own face to Lily in her black lace gown, with the black fox-fur wrap slung over her elegant shoulders and diamonds winking in the light, almost as brilliant as the tears standing in her blue eyes. He did not say a word. He turned from the mirror, staring at her. Harrison saw their eyes link and it was as though there was no one else in the room, just Lily and Ned.

He glanced at Lucky, and could tell from the expression on her face what she was thinking: that in their four years together, Ned had never looked at her quite like that. As though no one else existed for him, no other woman in the entire world. Lucky put a hand to her trembling lips, on the verge of tears, and Harrison felt a rush of pity for her. He knew, just as she did, that it was all over for her.

Ned took Lily’s hand. He put it to his lips and kissed it. He held both of her hands in his and stood looking at her, marveling. “You have come back,” he said, his beautiful voice gruff with emotion.

“I had to see you,” Lily said simply.

Without looking at either Harrison or Lucky, Ned took his overcoat from the rack and flung it over his shoulders. His dresser hurried across with his white scarf and his hat, and he put his arm around Lily’s shoulders and they walked from the dressing room without a word of explanation or a backward glance.

Lucky watched them go, her hand still on her trembling lips, and a stricken expression in her eyes. She had looked pretty in a pale-pink silk dress, filled with excitement and animation, but with all the color gone from her face, she now looked washed-out and ill.

Harrison said hurriedly, “She’s a very old friend. Ned’s family have known her for years, but she has been … she’s been traveling. I think Ned didn’t even know if she was dead or alive. I guess he’s so overcome by seeing her again, he just plain forgot about you and me and the opening night party.” He picked up Lucky’s little chinchilla jacket and helped her into it. She was stiff with shock and he had to bend her elbows to get her arms into the sleeves.

“We shall go on to Sherry’s,” he said, adding confidently, “I guess Ned will join us, if he’s not there already.”

But Ned was not at the party, and he did not show up later. In fact it was said on Broadway that it was the first time a star had not attended his own opening night party, and the fact that the play was such a huge success made it all the more curious.

Harrison made half a dozen different excuses: that Ned had succumbed to a bad headache, that he had a sore throat and was afraid of losing his voice, and that he was exhausted. He asked everyone’s understanding and promised to throw another party the following night. Somehow, no one believed him and rumors flew about a bust-up between Harrison Robbins and Ned; about a fight with the author; about a row with the management; about a breakup with Lucky, who looked like a woman who had awakened from a bad dream and found herself still in it.

Ned and Lily clung to each other in the hansom cab, laughing and crying, murmuring, “I never thought … I
can’t believe it … How wonderful it is … I’m just so glad, so happy …” They did not need to finish their sentences, they only needed to look into each other’s faces to see how happy they were to see each other again. Back in Lily’s suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, she shrugged off her fox-trimmed wrap and stood smiling at him.